Urban Biopsy

Yahoo! Dates are set for Urban Biopsy at Sugar City November 4-28th

Reception Friday November 13th, 6 – 8 pm

Gallery Hours Thursdays and Fridays 6 – 8 pm and Saturdays 2 – 4 pm

Check out my show cards! I will mail them out, just as soon as they return from the printer. Hope you can make it.

I have been collecting quilt squares since April 2009 from various civic organizations in and around Buffalo, NY. I invite people to write or draw on quilt squares and respond to three prompts: 1. why are you in Buffalo? 2. tell me about your family history 3. what do you dream of for the future. I collect the squares, document them and use them to build quilts. Instead of filling my quilts with batting, as is tradition, I am using soil that I sampled from each municipality in Erie County. (There are thirty-three municipalities by the way. This is astounding to me, particularly because the population in Western New York has shrunk dramatically over the past fifty years.) Urban Biopsy exhibits the first quilt in the series, documentation of my process, and an installation based upon some of the stories I collected to date. My work investigates how communities are constructed, in particular Buffalo, by analyzing and sharing stories from Western New York inhabitants. Utilizing soil instead of batting incorporates the land people’s lives are built upon. Frequently when I discuss this work with participants or others there are many questions and much skepticism about the soil element. Several times I have been told that soil will “ruin” my quilts. I beg to differ. First of all, I am sterilizing the soil before I seal it in plastic and then sew the bundle into my quilt. But more importantly, this ground is the foundation of our lives. The ground may be polluted, weathered, masked by black top or sprinkled with fertilizer, yet it remains uniquely ours.